The federal government must have been smugly expecting a groundswell of public applause since it announced its decision to set up six new universities two weeks ago. May the good Lord prevent all reasonable Nigerians from joining the professional sycophants who feel duty bound to applaud every government decision, no matter how patently foolish it may be.

We do not need new federal universities. God knows. So should the federal government. The federal government has 27 universities. None of them is adequately funded, staffed or equipped. They are squalid institutions and given the state of their comprehensive dilapidation, they serve the ends of a certificate-loving nation, not of learning. Universities have a nobler purpose.

The decision of the executive council of the federation is foolish, cynical and wrong-headed. It is a mockery of our education and it is a mockery of our sense of direction as a nation. Sadly, once more the federal government chose to subordinate the fundamentals of development to the cosmetics of development for reasons that are not entirely inexplicable. Politics is all about the cosmetics of motion, not the fundamentals of movement.

We do not need any new universities – federal, state or private.  Not now, not in the near future, unless we overhaul and clean up the entire educational system and reposition it to meet the nation’s manpower and developmental needs. We have a surfeit of universities. Number is not the problem. As at 2008, in addition to the 27 federal universities, we had 30 state universities, 35 private universities and 19 other degree-awarding institutions in the country. Many more have been added since the last statistics were compiled. The executive council of the federation has been pretty responsive to applications for private universities. What, really, is in number?

The argument I have often heard is that Nigeria is a large and populous country and given the thirst of its citizens for education, or more appropriately, paper qualification, one hundred and eleven universities and other degree-awarding institutions are woefully inadequate to sate everyone’s thirst for paper qualification. It is, of course, a foolish argument but one that easily finds takers among the politicians and the contractors who actually decide the direction of our national development at all levels of government.

Our universities were once the pride of Africa and the developing countries. Not anymore. We have since surrendered our educational development to the locusts and chalked up shameful evidence. Officially 80 percent of graduates from Nigerian universities are unemployable. The government cannot pretend to be unaware of this. The failure rate in WAEC and NECO examinations is a national shame. The government knows this for a fact. If the government lacks the courage to admit that there is more to a country’s educational development than a pile of up numbers of educational institutions, then our future is doomed.

The response of this government to the grave and crippling problems of education has been consistently cynical. You would recall that in response to the mass failure in WAEC and NECO, the minister of education, R. Rufai, simply ordered principals of secondary schools to limit students to five subjects. The same woman, you would also recall, ordered the universities to lower their cut-off marks to 180 – because, yes, the children performed poorly in JAMB. Such sensible responses to this grave national problem certainly make the sensible wince.

About two months ago, the federal government held a one day workshop to examine the problems of education. The workshop, held at the instance of consultants through the presidency, added insult to injury. All we needed was a one-day workshop, right? The workshop was only useful to President Goodluck Jonathan who used it to lambast the formulators and the executors of past policies on education. Are the six new universities his answer to the problems he inherited? Talk of fresh air.

There is time for politics and there is time for facing a grave national problem such as we now face in education. Education is the key in all aspects of modern development. No one, least of all the PhD’s in the government, need to be reminded of that. It is either we have education worth the name or we don’t. Yes, we committed serious blunders in the past. No one holds this government responsible for them. But no, blunders don’t cure blunders.

The government must resist the temptation of spending quality time in search of scapegoats for whatever went wrong with our education in the past. The past is past. Now is now. The challenge is not in the past but in the now. What we want to see are informed and calculated steps by this government towards cleaning up the educational system and repositioning it in line with our national ambition in the 21st century. Building more universities when we cannot maintain the existing ones is hardly a sensible response to the challenges of education. The greatest harm we can do to ourselves is to embrace motion at the expense of movement – and then believe we are truly moving.

The government must also resist the temptation of compounding the blunders of the past by listening to the dictates of politics and ignoring the solemn voice of reason and statesmanship. The situation in education at all levels is grave and desperate. And desperate measures need to be taken now if the system is not to sink into a deeper crisis and take the future of our children down with it. The decision to build six new universities should be rescinded. It is foolish and wrong-headed. The fund appropriated for them should be used to adequately fund, staff and equip the existing 27 federal universities. We need qualitative education, not certificate mills. Twenty well-equipped, adequately funded and staffed universities will serve our needs much better than 111 universities and degree-awarding institutions turning out certificated but uneducated young men and women.

If the federal government does not know what to do with money, it can pass some to the governments of the five south-eastern states. Teachers in their universities have been on strike for four months now in protest over the non-implementation of a new pay structure.

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